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Missile Defense

Russian military leaders have expressed concern about US plans for a national missile defense system. Will defense technology be limited by possibilities for a strategic imbalance? Is this just SDI all over again?

lunarchick - 04:28pm Aug 15, 2001 EST (#7890 of 7905)
lunarchick@www.com

Alex: From a city, whose main space vehicle is a TROLLEY, the above is a definative article. Deserving fuller exposure:

ON MISSILE DEFENSE A pattern of deception

Sunday, August 12, 2001

In their campaign to sell a missile defense system to the American public and a skeptical world community, President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon have engaged in a disturbing pattern of deception.

The dangers posed by breaking international treaties or igniting a new arms race in space -- not to mention the cost or the effectiveness of these new weapons systems -- require a thorough and forthright debate. Yet so far, there is growing evidence that the Bush administration is not presenting the full picture to the American people.

SILENCING THE CRITICS Consider, for example, what happened to Nira Schwartz, a physicist and engineer who accused TRW, a military contractor, of faking tests and evaluations for the Pentagon's missile defense program. TRW fired her the next day.

Schwartz then shared the information with Professor Theodore A. Postol, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist, who has long argued that flawed software currently prevents a missile system from distinguishing between decoys and enemy warheads. Postol gained fame in defense circles in the 1990s for exposing the fake claims made by the military about Patriot missiles during the Gulf War.

For months, Postol has been circulating a government-commissioned independent report that supports his criticism of the missile defense system. Although the report was labeled an "unclassified draft" when Postol obtained it, the government has retroactively ruled that it includes secret information.

Now the Pentagon has accused Postol of circulating classified information.

In early July, the Pentagon asked MIT to investigate Postol's activities -- a request that has pitted academic freedom against the Department of Defense's effort to silence one of its most credible critics. For MIT, the stakes are high: The university could lose $319 million in missile defense contracts unless it aggressively investigates the professor.

AVOIDING CONGRESS For six months, dozens of members of Congress repeatedly asked the Defense Department and Secretary Rumsfeld to release an unclassified Pentagon report that criticized the missile defense testing program. The Pentagon finally released the Coyle Report, compiled by the Pentagon's chief civilian test evaluator, in June 2001. It concluded that the tests have become progressively easier so that they can be counted as a "success."

RIGGING THE TEST After the Defense Department suffered two widely publicized "misses," Pentagon officials knew they had to prove they could hit a bullet with a bullet. On July 14, a "kill vehicle" launched from the Pacific smashed into a rocket hurled from Vandenberg Air Force. Photographs of the vaporized target strengthened the Pentagon view that critics are just cranky curmudgeons.

What most people didn't know, however, was that the Defense Department had rigged the $100 million test. As Joe Conason reported in Salon magazine, "The rocket fired from Vandenberg was carrying a global positioning satellite beacon that guided the kill vehicle toward it." But this fact didn't surface until the Pentagon confirmed the presence of a GPS device to Defense Week magazine. A Pentagon official then conceded that "real warheads in an attack would not carry such helpful beacons."

ARMING THE HEAVENS The Bush administration has tried to cast the missile defense shield as a defensive weapon, a kind of giant umbrella that will prevent enemy missiles from attacking the American people. But the truth is more complicated.

The missile defense system is just the first step in a much larger plan to transform the military. The Rumsfeld Space Commission Report, pres

lunarchick - 04:32pm Aug 15, 2001 EST (#7891 of 7905)
lunarchick@www.com

The missile defense system is just the first step in a much larger plan to transform the military. The Rumsfeld Space Commission Report, presented to Congress just before Bush took office, proposed an offensive U.S. Space Corps that would dominate and control space by military means. The U.S. Space Commission's mission statement, "Vision 2020," even argues that the United States should "control and dominate" space and "deny other countries access to space."

Bruce Gagnon, international coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and National Power in Space, says that "This whole missile defense program is ultimately a Trojan horse. Pentagon officials understand that they can't come before the American people and say, 'Give us hundreds of billions of dollars so we can have offensive weapons in space.' We are talking about creating a new arms race in space that will make the aerospace corporations richer than one could imagine."

THE SECRET IS OUT In a recent CBS News program, Dan Rather scrutinized the allegations made by Schwartz and Postol and seemed to find their testimony quite credible.

And in a recent New York Times Magazine article, "The Coming Space War," Jack Hitt described the elaborate facilities at which plans for a future Space Corps and space-based weapons are being conceived.

(The next day, coincidentally, came the news that a coalition of conservative organizations and defense-industry labor unions have launched an intensive lobbying campaign to ensure passage of Bush's proposed $8.3 billion missile defense budget for next year.)

THE NEXT STEP It's time for the American people to understand what's at stake. The development of a missile defense system violates the 1972 ABM Treaty, which outlawed missile defense systems. If the United States prepares to launch space-based weapons, it will also violate the 1967 Outer Space Treaty that banned the militarization of space.

We also need to shed the illusion that there is such a thing as a perfect defense. Someone, someday, will inevitably find a way to pierce supposedly impenetrable defenses.

This debate is not just about whether it is possible to protect Americans from incoming missiles. It is about the desirability of transforming the military into a space-based fighting force and deploying weapons in outer space.

This may sound like science fiction, but it is what's passing as serious military policy in the Bush White House.

lunarchick - 04:36pm Aug 15, 2001 EST (#7892 of 7905)
lunarchick@www.com

CONFLICT OF INTEREST: wrt

" .. We are talking about creating a new arms race in space that will make the aerospace corporations richer than one could imagine."

one has to remember that Elder Bush works with Caryle (use search button) which has interests in 'communications' manufacturing. The flow of dollars into MD gives X President and President a commission via Conflict of Interest associations.

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